Bond Boners

I hate it (as I’m sure you do) when I am reading happily through a novel, only to stumble across what should have been an easily avoidable historical error. That happened to me two times this morning with Anthony Horowitz’s Forever and a Day, his generally excellent second James Bond adventure (after 2015’s Trigger Mortis).

On page 214, Horowitz refers to the Marie Celeste. He obviously intended to write Mary Celeste, the name of an American merchant brigantine that was found mysteriously adrift and abandoned off the coast of Portugal in 1872; the Marie Celeste was a fictionalized version of that vessel, featured in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1884 short story, “J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement.” Three pages later, Horowitz has a character say, “As a matter of fact, I actually knew President Woodrow Wilson when he brought in the Neutrality Acts back in the thirties …” Well, as a matter of fact, Wilson—though he did, in 1914, declare that the United States would remain neutral as World War I erupted in Europe—died in 1921. It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who was in office when, in the 1930s, Congress passed the Neutrality Acts (prior to America’s entry into World War II).

Just so you know, I was reading the British version of Forever and a Day (released in May). Let’s see if the copy editors at Harper, Horowitz’s American publisher, will correct these mistakes before the book appears on U.S. shelves in November. I’m skeptical, as Harper’s advance readers’ edition of the novel simply repeats the errors.